Renata Mutis Black with the recipients of 7Bar’s current India-based microfinance project.
Profile: Renata Mutis Black
Lingerie Miami is part of a new phenomenon: A ‘philanthropic brand’, according to 7Bar Foundation’s Director Renata Mutis Black. While the immediate focus is a glamorous event scheduled for February 2009 that showcases luxury lingerie designers from around the world, Lingerie Miami is actually the culmination of one woman’s lifetime desire to improve the material, social and spiritual welfare of those less fortunate than herself.
Black’s benevolence is deep rooted. Early on, she identified her vocation to help others. A major influence in this chosen path was the tragedy that devastated her own world as a young child when both her parents died when she was just one year old. Ever magnanimous, she is keen to acknowledge how blessed she feels to have been adopted by an aunt and uncle whose efforts she describes as ‘very courageous’.
After graduating from college at the University of North Carolina, Black decided to take a trip around the world to get to know the true cultures of the places she visited and volunteer her services in each. In New Zealand she worked with the mentally disabled elderly, in Hong Kong it was terminally ill children, and in Egypt she became involved with a hospital for children born into poverty.
But, it was the events of the 2004 Tsunami that polarized Black’s vision. While helping to rebuild the villages shattered by the catastrophic flooding she was approached by a woman. “She was strong-voiced, with piercing-eyes and she said to me, ‘I know you have money and I don’t want it but why don’t you teach me how to make it myself!’” This chance encounter sparked a new course for Black who immediately set out to find how she might accomplish this poignant request. “I discovered a huge world of microfinance and went about educating myself by attending loads of courses and seminars including one at the Boulder Institute in Turin, Italy.” Explains Black.
“My inspiration is the women in the world who live on under a dollar a day, break their backs to make it and still smile back at life.” Black explains. Having learned how to design these programs, Black returned to India to make villages assessments and, where applicable implement appropriate programs. Till this day the program still exists with the help of the Indian government and one powerful, vivacious 25-year-old Indian woman. It is Black’s aim to ‘adopt’ around half a dozen countries in which her organization will invest $100,000 in an established microfinance institute in each.